Mattis to Military: Don’t Obey Trump’s Illegal Orders

Gen. James Mattis’s public rebuke of Trump, published yesterday at The Atlantic, was extraordinary and possibly unprecedented. It also has huge implications for Trump’s continued mishandling of the ongoing protests. I’ll paste the complete statement from Mattis to the end of this post.

The relationship between the military and civilian authority is central to U.S. military culture. The military sees itself as subsurvient to civilian authority, which is a good thing — we don’t want the military to become a power unto itself. But military personnel also swear to uphold the Constitution. And this gives us the possible nightmare scenario — what do they do if civilian authority in the person of the Commander in Chief gives them an illegal or unconstitutional order?

Over the past few days there has been a lot of talk of that very thing. What would happen if Trump ordered troops to attack protesters exercising their First Amendment rights to peacefully assemble? Monday, that happened. And Trump is still ranting about using the Insurrection Act to send federal troops into U.S. cities. This is not a hypothetical question.

I have heard from many sources that career military officers hold General Mattis in the highest regard; he commands huge moral authority, even if he is retired from active duty. And the implication of yesterday’s message was clear — the military must not obey Trump if he orders troops to end demonstrations.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

“We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society.” That’s an extraordinary thing for a general to say of the Commander in Chief.

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” he writes, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

He goes on to implicitly criticize the current secretary of defense, Mark Esper, and other senior officials as well. “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.’ At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

Not everyone in the military is honorable, of course, but I honestly believe this takes the option of using federal troops any way he wants out of Trump’s hands. The brass will listen to Mattis before they listen to Trump.

General Mattis has been criticized for his silence on Trump up until now. I have criticized him, and top brass generally, too. From six months ago:

One of the central values of the American military is that they are subservient to civilian authority, and civilian authority is personified in the Commander in Chief. So exposing the POTUS as a monster would be extraordinarily difficult thing for them, no question. But more difficult than, say, storming Normandy Beach?

Clearly, talk of using federal troops against civilians was a bridge too far for Mattis. It’s interesting also that he evoked Nazis —

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Bringing up Nazis also evokes the Nuremberg Trials and reminds us that “we were only following orders” is no excuse.

It’s not stopping with Mattis. Yesterday Gen. John Allen (U.S. Marine Corps, retired) published an op ed at Foreign Affairs that, in brief, ripped Trump another asshole. (See also Paul LeBlanc, CNN, Retired Marine Gen. John Allen: Trump’s threats of military force may be ‘the beginning of the end of the American experiment’.)  I had already noted yesterday that Admiral Mike Mullen, who was chair of the Joint Chiefs during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, wrote that he is disgusted with the Bible Stunt.

Trump, of course, responded to Mattis with his signature juvenile insults.

My understanding is that nobody fired General Mattis; he was head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) when he retired from the Marines in 2013, and he resigned as Trump’s Secretary of Defense in 2019. Also, Mattis has had the nickname “mad dog” for many years, according to Snopes, and it probably originated as a kind of term of endearment from his troops. Troops absolutely cannot stop himself from lying. It’s pathological.

See also Mattis, other military leaders close ranks against Trump at NBC News and Greg Sargent, Trump’s latest eruption just showed that Jim Mattis is entirely right.

I don’t know if there are many examples of a commanding general refusing a direct order of the President, but I do know of one. In June 1865, a U.S. district judge handed down treason indictments against former Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and some others. Under the signed surrender agreements, these officers would remain paroled and free from prosecution as long as they obeyed the laws of the United States and did not take up arms against the United States. President Andrew Johnson — to my mind, the only POTUS who comes close to challenging Trump as “worst POTUS of all time” — fully supported the traitor charges.

Ulysses Grant was the highest ranking officer in the U.S. military at the time. Johnson asked Grant when Robert E. Lee might be arrested; Grant said, “Never.” Grant made it clear to Johnson that if ordered to arrest Lee, he would resign first. Per Grant biographer Ron Chernow, such an arrest would not only have violates the surrender agreement Grant had signed with Lee at Appomattox; arresting Lee would also have likely caused a lot of former Confederate soldiers to take up arms against the government again. Johnson recognized that Grant was a whole lot more popular than he was and told the district judge to drop the indictments.

Grant spent all of the Andrew Johnson Administration walking a tightrope between his duty to obey the Commander in Chief and his duty to the law and Constitution; it’s a fascinating bit of history that Chernow explains nicely. The point is that these are issues top brass has had to contend with before. They just haven’t had to do it recently.

The statement from General Mattis:

IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH

I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.  — General James Mattis

 

 

Ulysses S Grant Memorial, Washington, DC